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I originally planned on writing a little introduction here, on how
bummed I've become, partly because I'm taking the House passage of
Zombie Trumpcare hard -- my wife likes to badmouth the ACA but it
afforded me insurance for two years between when she retired and I
became eligible for Medicare, and it's done good for millions of
other people, reversing some horrible (but evidently now forgotten)
trends -- and partly because the 100 days was just a dry run for
still worse things to come. But I wound up writing some of what I
wanted to say in the Savan comment below.

One thing that's striking about the Trumpcare reactions is how
morally outraged the commentators are ("one of the cruelest things,"
"war on sick people," "moral depravity," "sociopathic," "hate poor
and sick people," "homicidal healthcare bill"). If you want more
details, follow the Yglesias links: he does a good job of explaining
how the bill works. It's also noteworthy how hollow and facetious
pretty much everything the bill's supporters say in defense of it
is. I've offered a few examples, but could easily round up more.
I've added a link on Democrats-still-against-single-player (a group
which includes Nancy Pelosi and Jon Ossoff, names mentioned below).
Let me try to be more succinct here: single-payer is the political
position we want to stake out, because it's both fairly optimal and
simple and intuitive. If you can't get that, fine, compromise with
something like ACA plus a "public option" -- an honest public option
will eventually wind up eating the private insurance companies and
get you to single-payer. But you don't lead with a hack compromise
that won't get you what you want or even work very well, because
then you'll wind up compromising for something even worse. We should
remember that Obama thought he had a slam dunk with ACA: he lined up
all of the business groups behind his plan, and figured they'd bring
the Republicans along because, you know, if Republicans are anything
they're toadies for business interests. It didn't work because the
only thing Republicans like more than money is power. (They're so
into power they were willing to tank the economy for 4 or 8 years
just to make Obama look bad. They're so into power they held ranks
behind Trump even though most of the elites, at least, realized he
was a hopeless buffoon.)

On the other hand, the shoe is clearly on the other foot now: it's
the Republicans who are fucking with your health care, and they're
doing things that will shrink insurance rolls by millions, that will
raise prices and weaken coverage, that will promote fraud and leave
ever more people bankrupt. Those are things that will get under the
skin of voters, and Republicans have no answer, let alone story. The
other big issue noted below is the environment. The EPA is moving
fast and hard on policies that will severely hurt people and that
will prove to be very unpopular -- maybe not overnight, but we'll
start seeing big stories by the 2018 elections, even more by 2020,
and air and water pollution is not something that only happens to
"other people."

I didn't include anything on how these changes have already affected
projections for 2018 elections, because at this point that would be
sheer speculation. To my mind, the biggest uncertainty there isn't
how much damage the Republicans will do (or how manifest it will be)
but whether Democrats will develop into a coherent alternative. That's
still up for grabs, but I'll see hope in anything that helps bury the
generation of party leaders who were so complicit in the destruction
of the middle class and in the advance of finance capital. To that
end, Obama's $400,000 Wall Street speech clearly aligns him with the
problems and not with the solutions.

[PS: This section on the French election was written on Saturday,
before the results came in. With 98% reporting, Emmanuel Macron won,
65.8% to 34.2% for Marine Le Pen.
TPM's post-election piece included a line about how the election
"dashed [Le Pen's] hopes that the populist wave which swept Donald
Trump into the White House would also carry her to France's presidential
Elysee Palace." I don't see how anyone can describe Trump's election
as a "populist wave" given that the candidate wasn't a populist in
any sense of the word -- not that Le Pen is either. Both are simple
right-wingers, who advance incoherent and mean-spirited programs by
couching them in traditional bigotries. While it's probable that the
center in France is well to the left of the center in the US, a more
important difference is that Trump could build his candidacy on top
of the still-respected (at least by the mainstream media) Republican
Party whereas Le Pen's roots trace back to the still-discredited
Vichy regime. But it also must have helped that Macron had no real
history, especially compared to the familiar and widely-despised
Hillary Clinton. (Just saw a tweet with a quote from Macron: "The
election was rly not that hard I mean . . . how despised do you have
to be to get beaten by a fascist am I right?" The tweet paired the
quote with a picture of Hillary.)

[More reaction later, but for now I have to single out
Anne Applebaum: Emmanuel Macron's extraordinary political achievement,
especially for one line I'm glad I never considered writing: "Not since
Napoleon has anybody leapt to the top of French public life with such
speed." She goes on to explain: "Not since World War II has anybody won
the French presidency without a political party and a parliamentary base.
Aside from some belated endorsements, he had little real support from
the French establishment, few of whose members rated the chances of a
man from an unfashionable town when he launched his candidacy last
year." She makes him sound like Kiefer Sutherland, who plays the
president in the TV series Designated Survivor -- which despite
much centrist corniness is a pleasing escape from our actual president.]

One likely reason for Putin to support Le Pen is the latter's
promise to withdraw France from NATO. The interest of Trump and US
far-right activists is harder to fathom -- after all, even fellow
fascists have conflicting nationalist agendas, and nationalist
bigots ultimately hate each other too much to develop any real
solidarity, even where they share many prejudices. For instance,
why should Trump applaud Brexit and further damage to European
unity? Surely it can't be because he gives one whit about anyone
in Europe.

John Nichols argues that Obama's endorsement of Macron
Is an Effort to Stop the Spread of Trumpism, but while right-wing
nationalist movements have been gaining ground around much of the world,
it's hard to see anything coherent enough to be called Trumpism, much
less a wave that has to be stopped anywhere but here. Obama may have
good reasons for publicizing his endorsement, and may even have enough
of a following in France to make his endorsement worth something, but
given his recent buckraking it could just as well be meant to solidify
his position among the Davos set. Besides, I haven't forgotten his
proclamation that "Assad must go" -- his assumption of America's right
to dictate the political choices of others, which had the effect of
tying America's diplomatic hands and prolonging Syria's civil war.
At this stage I'm not sure I even want to hear his position on any
American political contest -- least of all one having to do with
leadership of the major political party he and the Clintons ran into
the ground.

Big news this week is that the Republicans passed their "health
care reform" bill -- most recently dubbed "Zombie Trumpcare 3.0" --
in the House. They had failed a while back because they couldn't
get enough votes from the so-called Freedom Caucus, but solved that
problem by making the bill even worse than it was. Some links:

Aaron Rupar: HHS Secretary Price argues people with pre-existing
conditions should pay more; also
Fox News host says health care for people with pre-existing conditions
is a 'luxury'. Things like this make you wonder how dumb people
can be if they think their political identity demands it. The fact is
that everyone has a "pre-existing condition" sooner or later. In the
old days, you could sometimes maintain insurance coverage by continuity --
by sticking with a job and its insurance plan if it didn't weed you out
at the start, but now it's even harder to keep lifetime jobs. I also
knew some people who were able to get community-rated individual plans,
and maintained their continuity through hell and high water, because
they would never be able to switch to another insurance program. The
ACA helped fix those problems, and thereby helped make sure that health
insurance would actually insure you when you needed it. Anyone who
wants to go back to a system which encourages insurance companies to
drop anyone they think might cost them is simply crazy -- especially
given that the pre-ACA system allowed costs to skyrocket way beyond
virtually anyone's ability to pay as you go.

Joel Dodge: The Case Against Single-Payer: Meant more to be a
case for some sort of "public option," which as I recall was mostly
opposed because it was viewed as a stalking horse for single-payer,
especially out of the fear that a "public option" would turn out to
be so popular private insurance wouldn't be able to compete. Still,
it's hard at this point to see the political advantage of pushing
"public option" over single-payer. The latter is intrinsically more
efficient in that it eliminates the overheads of marketing and the
need to generate profits, as well as fracturing the insurance pool.
That leaves lots of issues figuring out what is/isn't covered and
how much providers are paid -- things that market competition can
help with, but everywhere else single-payer systems have managed
to do more/less satisfactorily. Dodge cites Georgia Democrat Jon
Ossoff as rejecting single-payer in favor of "incremental progress
based upon the body of law on the books" -- something I have no
problem with, but I don't see that sort of tinkering-with-ACA as
making the necessary political impact. Single-payer gets the core
idea of equal coverage as a right across. If anything, it doesn't
go far enough. Why not start building public-interest health care
providers, and see how well the private sector competes with
them?

The Environmental Protection Agency has dismissed at least five members
of a major scientific review board, the latest signal of what critics
call a campaign by the Trump administration to shrink the agency's
regulatory reach by reducing the role of academic research.

A spokesman for the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, said he would
consider replacing the academic scientists with representatives from
industries whose pollution the agency is supposed to regulate, as part
of the wide net it plans to cast. "The administrator believes we should
have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on
the regulated community," said the spokesman, J. P. Freire.

The dismissals on Friday came about six weeks after the House passed
a bill aimed at changing the composition of another E.P.A. scientific
review board to include more representation from the corporate world.

President Trump has directed Mr. Pruitt to radically remake the E.P.A.,
pushing for deep cuts in its budget -- including a 40 percent reduction
for its main scientific branch -- and instructing him to roll back major
Obama-era regulations on climate change and clean water protection. In
recent weeks, the agency has removed some scientific data on climate
change from its websites, and Mr. Pruitt has publicly questioned the
established science of human-caused climate change.

Josh Marshall: Why They're So Scared About Mike Flynn: Reaction
to two new stories deepening the mess Flynn created and left behind --
not something I'm terribly interested in because ever since Michael
Hastings' Rolling Stone article on McChrystall it's been clear
to me that Flynn was an erratic and unscrupulous hustler no one should
ever trust. (Many think Obama fired McChrystall for insubordination,
but it was Flynn who actually said the nastiest shit about Obama, as
he continued to do even after Obama appointed him DIA head -- one of
Obama's all-time worst appointments, by the way.) After leaving the
military, Flynn only became unreliable, pimping himself to foreign
governments while ingratiating himself to the Trump campaign. What
he actually accomplished with all his double-dealing isn't clear, or
even that interesting, to me, but I'm sure there are cautionary tales
to be learnt here. (For one, that luck in wartime allows officers
wholly unsuited for command to rise far beyond their competency --
a famous, albeit far-removed, case might be George Armstrong Custer.)
Trump's attraction to Flynn may have been because they shared common
paranoias, but Flynn's interest in Trump was probably just that he
was an easy mark. I suppose we're lucky that the pair of them didn't
do more damage than they did, but we're not exactly out of the woods
yet.

The ways that Jared, "senior adviser to the president," and Ivanka,
"assistant to the president," have already benefited from their links
to "Dad" in the first 100 days of his presidency stagger the imagination.
Ivanka's company, for instance, won three new trademarks for its products
from China on the very day she dined with President Xi Jinping at her
father's Palm Beach club.

In a similar fashion, thanks to her chance to socialize with Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, her company could be better positioned for
deal negotiations in his country. One of those perks of family power
includes nearing a licensing agreement with Japanese apparel giant Sanei
International, whose parent company's largest stakeholder is the
Development Bank of Japan -- an entity owned by the Japanese government.
We are supposed to buy the notion that the concurrent private viewing of
Ivanka's products in Tokyo was a coincidence of the scheduling fairy.
Yet since her father became president, you won't be surprised to learn
that global sales of her merchandise have more or less gone through the
roof.

Leslie Savan: A Hundred Days of Trump Denial: Unlike Savan, I
never expected Trump to somehow step down or go away let alone be
impeached or (as the 25th amendment seems to allow) be declared
incompetent. In fact, I'm not even sure he's a greater embarrassment
than Ronald Reagan was, although this time many more people can see
through his act, and his supporting cast is far more craven (not
that Reagan's didn't want to be, they just hadn't yet lost all sense
of shame). The fact is that Trump, like Reagan and the Bushes, will
wind up doing a great deal of damage to the country. It just won't
happen overnight or over 100 days. It will incrementally seep into
the system, like water and wind tearing apart mountains, and when
it does, it will be so thorough people line Clinton and Obama won't
be able to repair it -- although perhaps others, with more insight
and more fortitude, might do better at finding ways to rebuild on
the tattered landscape.

It has been a long, knock-down drag-out battle, but the ugly intramural
conflict over why Clinton lost to Trump is finally over. New polls and
focus groups conducted by Clinton's own SuperPAC Priorities USA shows
that while racism and sexism had some effect, the main driver of Trump's
victory was economic anxiety, after all. The data showed that voters who
switched from Obama to Trump had seen their standards of living decline
and felt that the Democratic Party had become the party of the wealthy
and unconcerned about their plight. . . .

fThose who try to win elections for a living also aren't looking
forward to fighting the full power of the financial and pharmaceutical
interests in addition to the regular armada of right-wing corporate
groups. It would be much easier for electoral strategists if Democrats
could unlock a majoritarian liberal bloc with a "rising tide lifts all
boats" ideology that doesn't greatly inconvenience the urban donor class.
Consultants aren't exactly looking forward to trying to win elections
against interest groups angered by arguing for renegotiating NAFTA,
punishing corporations for sending jobs overseas, raising the capital
gains tax rate, and cutting health insurance companies out of the broad
American marketplace. But that's exactly what they're going to have to
do if want to win not only the presidency, but the congressional seats
and legislatures dominated by increasingly angry suburban and rural
voters. Not to mention angry young millennials of all identities who
have essentially been locked out of the modern economy by low wages
combined with outrageous cost of living, especially in the housing
market that has uncoincidentally been such a major investment boon
for their lucky parents, grandparents, and the financial industry.

Patrick Cockburn: Fall of Raqqa and Mosul Will Not Spell the End for
Isis: One should recall, first of all, that Raqqa and Mosul weren't
conquered by Isis so much as abandoned by hostile but ineffective central
governments in Damascus and Baghdad. Before, pre-Isis was just another
salafist guerrilla movement, as it will remain once its pretensions to
statehood have been removed. And the Iraqi government is no more likely
to be respected and effective in Mosul than it was before. (I have no
idea about what happens to Raqqa if Isis falls there -- presumably not
Assad, at least not right away.)

America Rising was formed in 2013 by Matt Rhoades, the director of Mitt
Romney's failed 2012 presidential campaign, and it represents the worst
of what our current political system offers. Its goal is not to debate
the issues or offer solutions to the nation's problems. Instead, the PAC
gets cash from big-money donors and spends it trying to tear down its
political opponents.

The Republican National Committee's "autopsy" of its 2012 presidential
loss reportedly concluded that the party needed an organization that
would "do nothing but post inappropriate Democratic utterances and act
as a clearinghouse for information on Democrats."

Mehdi Hasan: Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason -- They Remember
the Korean War. Bigger problem: they don't remember it ending,
because for them it never really did: they're still stuck with the
sanctions, the isolation, the mobilization and felt need for constant
vigilance. One might argue that the regime has used these strictures
to solidify its own rule -- that in some sense they're more satisfied
with a continuing state of crisis than anything we'd consider normalcy,
but we've never really given them that option. America's failure to
win the Korean War was an embarrassment, and no one since then has
had the political courage to admit failure and move on. Hence, we're
stuck in this cycle of periodic crises.

The official history of the air war in Korea (The United States Air
Force in Korea 1950-1953) records that U.S.-led United Nations air
forces flew more than one million sorties and, all told, delivered
a total of 698,000 tons of ordnance against the enemy. In his 1965
memoir Mission with LeMay, General Curtis LeMay, who directed the
strategic bombing of both Japan and Korea, offered this observation:
"We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both . . .
We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million
more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound
to ensue."

Other sources place the estimated number of civilian Korean War dead
as high as three million, or possibly even more. Dean Rusk, a supporter
of the war who later served as secretary of state, recalled that the
United States bombed "everything that moved in North Korea, every brick
standing on top of another."

Americans killed in the Korean War totaled 33,739, a little more
than 1% of the number of Koreans killed, so sure, we remember the war
a bit less ominously. Dower's new book is The Violent American
Century: War and Terror Since World War Two.

Reporting from the ground is often overwhelmed by the Washington consensus.
Washington-based reporters tell us that one potent force in Syria, al-Nusra,
is made up of "rebels" or "moderates," not that it is the local al-Qaeda
franchise. Saudi Arabia is portrayed as aiding freedom fighters when in
fact it is a prime sponsor of ISIS. Turkey has for years been running a
"rat line" for foreign fighters wanting to join terror groups in Syria,
but because the United States wants to stay on Turkey's good side, we hear
little about it. Nor are we often reminded that although we want to support
the secular and battle-hardened Kurds, Turkey wants to kill them. Everything
Russia and Iran do in Syria is described as negative and destabilizing,
simply because it is they who are doing it -- and because that is the
official line in Washington.

Mark Karlin: Government Has Allowed Corporations to Be More Powerful
Than the State: An interview with Antony Loewenstein, author of
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, so it
focuses on corporations profiting from disasters around the world.
That's interesting and revealing, but I would have taken the title
in a different direction. What I've found is that we've allowed
corporations so much control over their workers that a great many
people are effectively living under totalitarian rule, at least
until they quit their jobs (and in some cases beyond -- I, for
instance, was forced to sign a no-compete agreement that extended
for years beyond my employment). And that sort of thing has only
gotten worse since I retired.

Nate Silver: The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton the Election:
FBI czar James Comey spent a couple days last week testifying before
Congress on his strategic decision to announce, on October 28 before
the November 8 election, that the FBI was investigating a fresh batch
of Hillary Clinton's emails, reopening a case that had been closed
several months before. As Silver notes, "the Comey letter almost
immediately sank Clinton's polls," starting a spiral that cost her
a polling lead she had held all year long. There are, of course,
lots of factors which contributed to her loss, but this is one of
the few that can be singled out, precisely because the "what if"
alternative was itself so clear cut -- Comey could simply have held
back (which would have been standard FBI policy) and nothing would
have happened. Many people have made this same point, not least the
candidate herself, but Silver backs it up with impressive data and
reasoning. He recognizes that the swing was small, and shows how
even a small swing would have tilted the election. He also makes
a case that somewhat larger swing (what he calls "Big Comey") was
likely. The way I would put this is: Clinton has been dogged by
scandals constantly since her husband became president in 1993 --
the first big one was "Whitewater" and there had been a steady
drumbeat of them all the way through Benghazi! and the emails and
speaking fees and Clinton Foundation. Clinton had somehow managed
to put those behind her by the Democratic Convention, when she
opened up her largest polling lead ever (although, something I
found troubling at the time, she never seemed able to crack 50% --
her 10-12% leads were more often the result of Trump cratering).
What the Comey letter did was to bring all the fury and annoyance
of her past scandals back into the present. Trump's final ad hit
that very point: maybe we have lots of difficult problems, but
voters had one clear option, which was to get rid of Clinton and
all the scandals, both past and future. And that was the emotional
gut reaction that swung the election -- even though a moment's
sober reflection would have realized that Trump is far worse in
every negative respect than Clinton.

Steve W Thrasher: Barack Obama's $400,000 speaking fees reveal what
few want to admit: "His mission was never racial or economic
justice. It's time we stop pretending it was." It does, however,
suggest that his real mission -- what many people take to be the
real meaning of the phrase "American dream" -- is not just to be
accepted and respected by the very rich, but to join them. As the
Clintons have shown, one way to become rich in America is to get
yourself elected president. And as has been pretty convincingly
demonstrated, anything the Clintons can do, Obama can do much
better.